“Do you have any idea how much,” Sidney Bruhl rhapsodizes in Deathtrap (at the Jungle, through May 19), “a play like that is worth in today’s market? Two million dollars!” Is it really possible? That a combination of glib theatrics, rapier-thin characters, twisty thrilleresque plotting and nasty comedy could transform an innocent dramatist into...
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It’s a dark and stormy night. Working in a rented and calculatedly funky New York City rehearsal studio, director slash playwright slash occasional actor Thomas is ending a long day of auditions for his adaptation of the obscure German novel Venus Im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Thomas phones his girlfriend Stacy and vents:...
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Lord preserve Samuel Beckett (and Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee, et al) from the predations of literary theorists who have declared him “important,” a practitioner of something called, airily, “theater of the absurd,” a playwright with deep philosophical leanings. This is nonsense. Beckett was not in the “significance” business; he created...
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Are you ready for a mop-your-eyes-and-try-to-catch-your-breath laugh? The Jungle Theater plans a summer run of Noises Off by Michael Frayn, which is easily the funniest farce I’ve ever seen. I first knew about the play when I read it on a plane, laughing out loud and getting a few looks from the other passengers,...
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Welcome back to the days of civilized murder and mayhem, done with style by people who wear dinner jackets and sip brandy in an elegant gold-toned living room. This is the world recreated at the Jungle Theater for Frederick Knott’s 1952 Broadway hit, Dial M for Murder, a classy production and wonderfully satisfying evening...
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Hamlet (at the Jungle Theater, through Oct 9) is the greatest play ever written. William Shakespeare‘s sinuous exploration of (in no particular order) revenge, love, ambition, power, madness, violence, suicide, lust, agonizing passivity, aristocratic privilege represents, along with the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Giza and the 9th Symphony, a truly...
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For the first time in the Swiss cheesy memory of this reviewer, a Jungle Theater play has been directed by neither Bain Boehlke nor by his apparent heir apparent Joel Sass. Instead, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (at the Jungle, through July 31) is helmed by the redoubtable John...
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The Jungle Theater’s spring offering deals with one of those issues that lurks on the fringes of our consciousness – except for those who live every day with the question, “What does it mean to be gay and Christian?” Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts tackles this worthy subject via a series of flashbacks that...
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Mandacrest. Hampstead Heath. Home of the tweedily eccentric Lord Edgar – he of the Ronald Colman mustache and the crushing dark secret. Freshly married to Lady Enid – she of the heaving bosom, the swirling blonde hair, and the dark secret. Then there is Nicodemus Underwood, the caretaker with the impossibly thick Scottish accent...
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When first produced in October 1962 (at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis), the boozy and vituperative Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (at the Jungle, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis, through May 30, jungletheater.com) blew through staid and polite Broadway like a cleansing fire. It showed us how frightening – indeed how downright dangerous...
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